Tuesday, April 14, 2015

DWI Is A Breeze Compared To DWB

There’s No Such Crime As ‘Driving While White’

The shooting of Walter L. Scottin South Carolina prompts the question:
When is the last time you heard of a white man in a Mercedes-Benz being pulled over for driving with a broken taillight?
It has probably happened somewhere, sometime, but there’s a better chance of your car being hit by a meteor.Getting shot dead during a minor traffic stop also isn’t a prevailing
fear among white males in America, no matter what type of vehicle they
own.

Scott himself didn’t imagine he was going to die when he was pulled
over. Unfortunately, he happened to be a Black man driving a Mercedes,
which is what got him noticed. He was behind on child-support payments
and probably didn’t want to go to jail.
Something happened at the scene, Scott got Tased and then tried to
run away. Officer Michael Slager fired eight times, hitting the unarmed
50-year-old in the back. The killing was caught on cellphone video by a
bystander.
Slager told the dispatcher that Scott had snatched his Taser, but the
video shows the officer dropping an object that looks just like a Taser
near Scott’s handcuffed body. Slager has been charged with murder and
fired from his job.The shooting was shocking to watch, as the whole world has, yet the
sequence of events leading up to it is sadly familiar to Black men in
this country. They can’t afford to drive around as carefree as us white
guys.
In September, a South Carolina state trooper shot and wounded another
unarmed Black motorist after pulling him over because he allegedly
wasn’t wearing his seatbelt.
I’ve got white friends who rarely buckle up, yet I don’t know of one
who has been ticketed for it, or even stopped and warned. Maybe they’re
just lucky.
The Black comedian Chris Rock uses his Twitter account to record his
traffic-stop encounters. In a recent seven-week period, he was pulled
over three times (once as a passenger).
It’s possible he and his friends aren’t very good drivers. It’s also
possible they’ve been targeted merely for “Driving While Black,”(DWB) an
unwritten offense that still exists in many regions of the country, not
just the Deep South — and not just in high-crime areas.
The odds would be fairly slim for a black man driving a luxury car
not to be pulled over at least once on a road trip between, say, Utah
and North Dakota. Even in a ’98 Taurus he’d need to be watching the
rear-view mirror for blue lights.
Generalizing about traffic stops can be problematic. The numbers
often spike in certain neighborhoods at certain times of day, and a
small number of officers can account for many incidents of racial
profiling.
Still, the evidence that it exists is more than anecdotal.
Using a “Police-Public Contact Survey,” the U.S. Justice Department
analyzed traffic stops of drivers aged 16 or older nationwide during
2011, comparing by race and weighting by population.
To the astonishment of hardly anyone, Black drivers were about 31
percent more likely to be pulled over than white drivers, and
approximately 23 percent more likely to be pulled over than Hispanic
motorists.
A series published by the Washington Post in September
reported that minority drivers had their cars searched (and cash seized)
at a higher rate than white drivers. That jibed with the Justice
Department’s conclusion that vehicle searches occurred substantially
more often when the driver wasn’t white.
Another unsurprising fact: Compared to other races, white drivers
were most likely to get pulled over for speeding. Black drivers were
statistically more likely to be stopped for vehicle defects or record
checks.Which is what happened to Walter L. Scott in North Charleston.
Never in almost five decades of driving have I been pulled over for a
busted brake light or a burned-out headlight, even though I’ve had a
few.
It didn’t matter whether I was in a Dodge, Oldsmobile, Jeep, Ford, Chevy or even, for a while, a Mercedes SUV.
The only thing I’ve ever been stopped for is, like many impatient white people, driving too fast.
And every time a police officer walked up to my car, I knew exactly
why he or she wanted to chat with me. It was no mystery whatsoever.
That’s not always the case for a Black man behind the wheel of a car
in this country. This is not just a perception; it’s a depressing
reality.
If it had been me or Matt Lauer or even faux Hispanic Jeb Bush
driving that Mercedes-Benz in South Carolina, Officer Slager wouldn’t
have stopped the car. Not for a busted taillight, no way.
Which prompts another question: How long can this go on?(Carl Hiaasen is a columnist for The Miami Herald. Readers may write to him at: 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, FL, 33132.)Photo: Redjar via Flickr

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